Abstraction Problem

Two new shows on an old idea.

An Adaptive, by the veteran Austrian artist Franz West.Credit “LISA DE COHEN WITH ADAPTIVE”(1983)/ARCHIV FRANZ WEST

Remember abstract painting? It used to be the living end of modernity in art. Now it’s just one variety of produce in the supermarket of visual culture. Two shows stir thoughts on the subject: new work by the paladin of white paintings, Robert Ryman, at PaceWildenstein, and “Comic Abstraction,” representing thirteen contemporary artists inspired by comics, cartoons, and other mediums of demotic fun, at the Museum of Modern Art. Ryman, seventy-six years old, is a Tennessean who came to New York in 1952 to be a jazz musician, and encountered the art world while working, for seven years, as a guard at MOMA. He matured as an artist in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties, between the decline of Abstract Expressionism and the dawn of minimalism. He conjoined and, ever since, has stayed true to features of both movements: expressively pure painterliness and blunt matter-of-factness. His works are as much mute essays in aesthetic philosophy as objects of pleasure. They delight, if you let them, by clarifying the material givens of any painting: shape, scale, paint texture, underlying surface, and attachment to a wall.

Most of the works in “Comic Abstraction,” by younger artists, derive inspiration—albeit remote and attenuated, and, at this late date, perhaps unconscious—from the same era that formed Ryman, when abstraction was still a reigning imperative and self-consciousness in and about aesthetic experience became an iron law. But they yoke those ideals to pursuits of frisky entertainment or earnest politics. Has abstraction, since the sixties, fallen from grace, or been liberated from preciousness? Both may be true.

There are four works in the Ryman show, all of them called “No Title Required” (2006)—finessing a title, “Untitled,” so common in the heyday of minimalism as to become something of a joke. (When not using it himself, Ryman has favored astringently poetic titles, on the order of “Regis,” “Consort,” and “Journal.”) The main attraction is an ensemble of ten paintings in smooth white enamel on wood, each a different size in a narrow range from fifty to fifty-five inches square. Each incorporates a wood frame (in oak, cherry, or maple), mounted flush. Paint bleeds across the abutments between surface and frame, establishing the paint skin as the work’s forward plane. This being Ryman, every aspect of what you see counts. The units hang close together along most of one wall and part of another. The walls are a matte, muted white, in contrast to the work’s glossy, bright enamel. Ghostly reflections of yourself provide vestiges of pictureness. Illumination is indirect, from banks of lights that shine on a wall across the room. The carpentry of the frames is imperfect; slight separations at their corner joins—as well as occasional cracks in the paint between frame and panel—register as chance elements of drawing. The grains, knots, and natural colors of the frames become practically rococo in their visual appeal, amid the prevailing blankness. The units’ shifting sizes defeat a reading of them as a unified whole. The suite’s length is given as six hundred and eighty-eight inches, which works out to fifty-seven and one-third feet. Intentional or not, that gawky one-third (an infinity of threes, when expressed in decimals) seems Rymanesque, consistent with a thoroughgoing aim to pique and discombobulate comprehension.

The three other works in the show are paintings on linen stapled over frames, each more than seven feet square. (Again, painting fronts frame, this time with the added thickness of the linen.) White oil paint is applied in brushy flurries over a very slightly darker ground. Surface qualities vary almost—but never quite—enough to suggest pictures of something: clouds, perhaps, or foliage. The effect is a stammer in the visual cortex, as your brain doggedly tries and incessantly fails to make conscious sense of the sensory input. This isn’t an unusual phenomenon in abstract art, or even in figurative art. (It also occurs in daily life, when confusion about what we see triggers a double take.) But such delicate fallibilities of eye and mind are the engines of Ryman’s art, which plays with self-aware looking for its own sake. How much you like him depends on a couple of things. First, how highly do you value feeling sensitive and smart? “Getting” a Ryman can produce the thrill, at your own acuity, that comes with grasping a proposition in mathematics or a tricky passage of music. For Ryman fans—including me, off and on—the effect is addictive. Second, do you buy into a romance of painting in extremis, so imperilled by skepticism that, to survive as indispensable art, it must jettison all functions that are not identical with its conceptual scheme and physical reality?

That romance dates Ryman as one of a cohort of abstract painters who, in the nineteen-sixties, simplified painting to save it. Others were the late Agnes Martin, with delicate grids, and Brice Marden, with brooding monochromes. (Frank Stella’s insolently literal-minded designs on blocky stretchers were the height of sophisticated taste back then; their emotional numbness has consigned them, in retrospect, to period décor.) Marden, as a marvellous recent retrospective at MOMA proved, has since reclaimed for disciplined abstraction a repertoire of tensile drawing and eloquent color. Ryman has sustained the old sense of crisis, as if each of his many ingenuities—with different paints and supports, and, over time, with a hardware store’s worth of deliberately obtrusive screws, brackets, and other mounting devices—were a tale told by Scheherazade to win another night’s reprieve, never mind that the sultan who had to be propitiated is dead. Ryman is a favorite of certain academic critics who, loyal to intellectual adventures of avant-garde art in the fifties and sixties, ignore most contemporary art and seem to mark time until a new development, or Second Coming, merits their engagement. Still, Ryman stays fresh and taut. Even out of date, his conscientious integrity ought to abash today’s hordes of careering youngsters, whose idea of the future of civilization reaches little beyond the next art fair. But to be shameable, under present conditions, may be an unaffordable moral luxury.

Vivacious brassiness rules in “Comic Abstraction,” organized by Roxana Marcoci, a curator in MOMA’s photography department—an interesting choice, given that the show contains no photographs. Except for an installation by one strongly original veteran artist, Franz West, the works on hand amount to new wine in old bottles. “Mirror in a Cabin with Adaptives” (1996), by West, the sixty-year-old Austrian Pied Piper of audience participation, invites viewers to disport themselves, in front of a mirror, with odd and appealing constructions of lumpy plaster on metal rods. Even declining the offer, I feel in good hands with West, a terrific sculptor who is conceptually as rigorous as Ryman, in a hippieish kind of way. Fully seven of the artists in the show run variations on the New York School of big painting—the expansive and diffusive field that was invented by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, and that has been adopted by painters of every subsequent generation. Like the blues foundations of rock and roll, it is easy to learn and it always works, if you can keep the beat. The challenge is to give it distinctive content and style. Pop art introduced the frisson of wedding lowdown imagery to the big painting’s sublime form. Cartoonishness has been a regular recourse of master painters from Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke to Carroll Dunham and Albert Oehlen. Their number is not increased by anyone in “Comic Abstraction,” whose wrinkles of novelty are just a proliferation of peculiar techniques and an amplification, to simultaneous extremes, of the ceremonious and the vulgar.

The show’s cast of picture-makers includes the lately ubiquitous Takashi Murakami, with crisply stylized renditions of spurting bodily fluids (breast milk and sperm) in baby pink and baby blue; Sue Williams, with what look to be Pollock-like fields, until you make out their constituent cartoon imagery of orgiastic goings on; Arturo Herrera, with a likewise webby, exceedingly handsome mural in which lurk scenes of Walt Disney’s “Snow White”; Julie Mehretu, the up-and-comer in this group, with a heady, infernally complicated overlay of diagrammatic motifs; Polly Apfelbaum, with a mandala on the floor, about eighteen feet in diameter, of dyed velvet petals whose color scheme alludes to the television cartoon “Powerpuff Girls”; and Inka Essenhigh, with neo-Surrealist creepy-crawlies in shiny enamel. Two African-Americans tackle racial themes: Ellen Gallagher, with lovely Agnes Martin-like compositions that incorporate tiny caricatures of Negroid lips and eyes; and Gary Simmons, with a smeared chalk drawing of a particularly vile black cartoon character of the nineteen-thirties. For appropriate jollies, there’s an installation by the late Spaniard Juan Muñoz: a darkened room with a lit-up mousehole, accompanied by a soundtrack, composed by the artist and a collaborator, of Saturday-morning whizzes, squeals, and thumps. New to me, poignantly, are jazzy paintings and a bank of video monitors flashing fractured logos by a conspicuously gifted German, Michel Majerus, who died in a plane crash, in 2002, at the age of thirty-five. Two other artists contribute negligible works with arbitrary political associations.

Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recent vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes. What’s lost—while being barely preserved, with monkish zeal, by the likes of Ryman—is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention. Pablo Picasso once zeroed in on the fundamental problem of abstract art, which he rejected, as “only painting. What about drama?” He added, “There is no abstract art.… A person, an object, a circle are all ‘figures’; they react on us more or less intensely.” The best modern abstract artists countered with jolting demonstrations of art’s intrinsic powers, independent of worldly reference. But their project proved self-defeating, as the looks of a Pollock or a Mondrian became just additional items in the world’s image bank, alongside Titian nudes and Mickey Mouse. Picasso’s cynical wisdom (minus his driving genius, of course) is common sense now, as artists like those in “Comic Abstraction” mix and match stock elements, with ever less drama and with intensity dwindling away. ♦

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